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Wednesday, December 10, 2014

"The sun shining in my dreams The light is getting hot Saved by eternity I have seen death so close Away, awhile the angels crossed the sky But I'm condemned to stay here." -- Heavenly

In his memoirs, Paul
Naschy said he had referred Argentine film directing stalwart Leon Klimovsky to be director of his
seminal Spanish horror classic La noche
de Walpurgis, AKA The Werewolf
Versus the Vampire Woman (1971), because one of the film’s financers wanted
a quick and reliable director.

It would seem that Klimovsky was known for his fast shooting and workmanlike skills,
and yet he managed to direct some real atmospheric classics of Spanish horror, often on
low budgets and high pressured shooting schedules, and he introduced an oft-imitated
technique of filming vampires and zombies in slow-motion, capturing a uniquely
nightmarish plane of existence in the process.Klimovsky’s vampire films are exceptional and interestingly varied,
and they belong alongside the best of Jess
Franco and Jean Rollin. The
aforementioned The Werewolf Versus the
Vampire Woman was a record breaking box office success that revived the
Spanish horror fantasy genre. The other Klimovsky
directed vampire films that followed were the epic The Dracula Saga (1973), the more grindhouse flavored The Vampires’ Night Orgy (1974), and the
romantic, adventurous, and somewhat eclectic Night of the Walking Dead / The Strange Love of the Vampires,the topic for tonight

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Mario
Bava’s final full-length film as director Shock (AKA Beyond the Door
II) is like TheAmityville Horror (1979), Repulsion (1965), and The Shining (1980) combined into a
progressive-rock tinged haunted-house Italian horror/mystery thriller that does
manage to be scary. Bava again
employs the vengeful ghost story, as in his child-themed Kill Baby Kill (1966), but keeps it in the family, creating a ghost
story about marital vengeance, which was based on a true story that Bava weaved in to an already existing
script, about a living house, he had co-written with Dardano Sacchetti several years prior. The end product is a slow-paced
but ultimately exhilarating experience that succeeds at being one of the
creepier Italian horrors. Bava’s son Lamberto Bava, who also contributed to
the script, said they were influenced a little more by Stephen King and were attempting to make a modern horror film.

The
film also has a possession angle that takes a few cues from The Exorcist (1973), which might have
been in response to the success of The
House of Exorcism (1975): producer Alfredo
Leone’s revamping of Bava’sLisa and the Devil (1973), with newly
filmed possession scenes spliced in.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

When looking over the lengthy cycle of mummy movies, one
in particular often goes heavily unmentioned, and that’s Spanish actor,
filmmaker Paul Naschy’s take on the
mummy myth, The Mummy’s Revenge / La venganza
de la Momia.

Being somewhat of a tragic love story, The Mummy’s Revenge is rather faithful to the original Universal
film and is also easy to compare to the 1959 Hammer reboot as well. What sets The Mummy’s Revenge apart is that it’s
a Paul Naschy film, meaning it’s
going to be a little more erotic, a little meaner, more fearsome, more violent,
and more personal. There is also a sadomasochistic element too, with a number
of maidens strung up for both amusement and sacrificial purposes.

The film is
directed by Carlos Aured and is
written by and stars Naschy. It is
one of four collaborations between Naschy
and Aured, with the other three being
theseminal Horror Rises from the Tomb (1972), part of the Waldemar Daninsky
Werewolf cycle Curse of the Devil (1972),
and the Spanish giallo Blue Eyes of the
Broken Doll (1973). The Mummy’s
Revenge is Naschy’s second, and
more focused, take on the mummy, as the creature did appear in Naschy’s horror/sci-fi monster mashup Assignment Terror (1970), along with
aliens, the werewolf, Frankenstein's monster, and Dracula.

Throughout the ‘50s,
Aurora starred in a number of
Spanish/Italian comedies and dramas, most of which seem to either have been
forgotten or fallen into obscurity. As the Euro film industry shifted its
output to different genres in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Aurora managed to land roles in Euro-westerns: Un hombre vino a matar (1967) and Su le mani, cadavere! Sei in arresto (1971) (under the direction of
Leon Klimovsky); Euro-spies, Agente X 1-7 operazione Oceano (1965)
and Top Secret (1967); and Euro-horrors
La Marca del Hombre-lobo (1968), La rebelión de las muertas (1973), and La orgía de los muertos (1973). The
three aforementioned horror films also starred Paul Naschy and seem to have been the most accessible. In addition,
she was frequently directed by José Luis
Merino. After starring in a line of comedies and dramas in the latter half
of the ‘70s, her movie career seemed to have taken an abrupt halt at the end of
the decade. What she was up to after that is probably anyone’s guess.

Some
sources list her as an Italian actress,
while others show her as a Spanish actress. Aurora is actually of Spanish origin, however she did get married in Italy and most likely lived there for a time. Another source lists her birth date as February 2nd, 1948;
this cannot be true, however, because, as was mentioned before, she was married in 1954, and the following image of her below is from the 1953 Venice Film
Festival, and looking to be somewhere in her early twenties at that time, it is
probably not a far cry to assume she was born sometime in the ‘20s or ‘30s.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

City of the Living Dead
is part of a high point in Lucio Fulci’s career
that would make him synonymous with gore, zombies, and splatter and also cause
him to be more generally regarded as a horror director, despite having worked in
numerous other film genres. Being the first film in what has become known as
The Gates of Hell trilogy, which also includes The Beyond (1981) and House
by the Cemetery (1981), City
feels a little rough around the edges, a step down from the previous Zombi 2 (1979) but at the same time a
stepping stone or prototype to The
Beyond, a film that masterfully embodies a dreadful but surreal atmospheric
ascetic that I like to call nightmarish horror, which abandons logic to create
a sense that anything can happen, usually something bad involving the eyes.

While
there is an interesting Lovecraftian story (co-written by Fulci and Dardano Sacchetti)
and plenty of dialogue and characters to fill it, City feels a bit like a compendium of gore scenes and set pieces,
most of which exemplify Fulci in top
form. It has its flaws and issues, yet it’s one of those films where you can
talk just as much about what’s wrong with it as you can about what’s right with
it, and what’s right is pleasing enough to supersede what’s wrong.

Despite
having a dodgy narrative, a few silly moments, and somewhat shallow characters, who
have grown on me with time, such as Bob (Giovanni
Lombardo Radice), the film is quite a macabre experiencethat has become known for its top-notch
ambiance and gore FX (by Gino De Rossi),
as well as succeeding as a horror film overall. It’s like a product of low
quality that nonetheless continually hits the sweet spot throughout its runtime
so that you just can’t help loving it. It’s almost the masterpiece The Beyond is.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

If you haven’t noticed, female vampires in movies have
been a long-running theme I’ve enjoyed exploring with this blog. It’s an
appealing aspect of fiction to me, and I just can’t get away from the
archetypical idea of the vampiress: her gothic image, seductive power, hidden
feral side, and deadly sexuality. Some time ago, around the time I reviewed The Blood Spattered Bride, I finally
gave Sheridan Le Fanu’sCarmilla a read and wasn’t too surprised
at realizing how much Carmilla’s influence is felt in a large number of cult
female vampire films. Although, there seems to have been a bit of a debate as
to whether or not the perceived erotic subtext in Le Fanu’s novella has been misinterpreted by non-Victorian readers,
yet many filmmakers have nonetheless taken the subtext at face value, taking
whatever supposed eroticism is there in the writing of the book out of
the implicit and into the explicit; and, for its time, Jess Franco’sFemale Vampire
(a.k.a. La comtesse noire,Bare Breasted Countess, Erotikill, and
many more) has to be the most erotic lady vampire piece, even more
so for the XXX version Lüsterne Vampire Im
Spermarausch. (On the opposite end of the spectrum is perhaps, and also
recommended, Let’s Scare Jessica to
Death — a Carmilla influenced
movie that hardly features any eroticism).

Friday, August 15, 2014

With Spirits of
Death, I’m reminded of how pleasing it is to keep discovering new
worthwhile Eurocult movies of the vintage variety. Years ago I thought that I
might have been coming close to exhausting my selection of every notable Eurohorror / giallo / surreal-art-house-drama
film. However, that notion seems to become more and more untrue with time,
which is counterintuitive, as it would seem that the more movies of this type you
see the closer you would be to seeing them all, but it nonetheless keeps
opening up a world that always seems bigger the further you go in.

Spirits of Death is one of those arty,
Eurohorror, giallo movies of a particular brand that I can’t believe I went so
long without knowing (let’s see if we can coin the term “Sleeping Eurocult” –
in winking reference to Agatha Christie’sSleeping Murder). Spirits of Death is directed and
cinematographed by Romano Scavolini,
who many may know as the director of an infamous Video Nasty from the early
‘80s, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain.
He is also the brother of Sauro Scavolini,
director of another marvelous “Sleeping Eurocult” Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods.

The film is essentially a
gathering of colorful guests, who have been invited by one of the proprietors,
Marialé (Ida Galli aka Evelyn Stewart), with mysterious
motives, to a spooky old castle. It might sound familiar, and it is, but the
gathering turns into a fascinating, candlelit journey into the underground
caverns of the castle as well as a delirious entertaining descent into a batshit
crazy Fellini-esque masquerade dinner
party before things turn over to a more traditional murder mystery, as party
guests start getting knocked off by an unseen assailant in the latter half.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

I was charmed the other day by a 1915 vintage, almost
Victorian looking, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes advertisement poster I spotted amongst
the old-fashioned-decor adorned on the walls at a local Cracker Barrel diner. While
staring at the ad, for some reason, I became curious as to the origin of Corn
Flakes. Where were they invented, and how did they come about? I previously had
a stereotypical notion that they may have originated in farming communities, due
to the rooster, Cornelius, usually observed on the boxes. After ordering
pancakes (not the multigrain or wheat ones but the regular pancakes), I googled
“Kellogg’s Corn Flakes history” on my phone, and the results were a little startling.

It appears the invention that brought about Corn Flakes was discovered by
accident in 1894, at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan by health reformist
Dr.John Harvey Kellogg and his brother Will Keith Kellogg as part of a bland diet to keep the patients
from having increased passions, i.e. to keep them from masturbating.

One day, the
Kellogg brothers left a batch of cooked wheat out to sit, when they were
diverted by urgent matters at the sanitarium. Upon their return, they’d found
that the wheat had gone stale, but because they were under a strict budget, they
decided to salvage the wheat. After pressing the wheat through rollers, it
formed, to their surprise, wheat flakes that were subsequently toasted and served
to the patients; it ended up being a hit. Later Will Keith Kellogg experimented with flaking corn, which he eventually
made into a successful business.

Dr. John
Harvey Kellogg was a pioneer surgeon, who succeeded in having exceptionally
low mortality rates with his surgery practice. He was the superintendent of the
Battle Creek Sanitarium and pioneered numerous health reform treatments, some
of which still hold up today. However, the good doctor sometimes missed the
mark.

Friday, July 11, 2014

“Genre rules” seem to be most common in zombie and
vampire films, and it’s with these particular genres that breaking the “rules”
ends up being the most controversial. Yet, these so called rules are
non-existent, and filmmakers can do whatever they want. Of course, the big risk
with breaking too many rules is that so many people will already hate the movie
before/without even bothering to see it. On the other hand, sticking with the
rules and relying too heavily on clichés is too easy and contributes to
oversaturation of a genre. I personally enjoy the best of both worlds, classic
and innovative, the best of the old with the best of the new. Give me what I
came for, but surprise me too. Clichés are important but more for the sake of
maintaining a basis of familiarity.

Harry
Kümel’s emblematic, chic, and sensual vampire seduction Daughters of Darkness falls somewhere
in the middle ground between familiar and different. It probably isn’t even
worth mentioning the many parallels between this movie and The Blood Spattered Bride or The
Shiver of the Vampires, other than to note they were made around the same
time and manage to be so different from one another, even though they tell
similar stories. They all contain a common sapphic vampire story that owes a
lot to Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Carmilla, which was adapted a year
earlier with The Vampire Lovers in
1970 and ten years before that with Blood
and Roses.

Friday, June 20, 2014

I used to not be able to stomach gory zombie films very
well. Despite being excited and thoroughly fascinated after watching zombie
films in my youth, I suffered from a loss of appetite for a while. Anytime I was trying to eat, my brain would be
like “you know what’s a good movie? Dawn of the Dead (1978),” and images from
the scene with zombies eating in the cellar would pop into my mind, and I would
be turned off to eating meat or anything savory for that matter. Sweets or
French fries were fine, but my mind just would not cease to relate the taste
and consistency of anything else, especially if it was slimy, to what it was
the zombies were chomping on. I was disgusted by zombie carnage but still
thought it was so cool.

The zombie film that grossed me out the most, which is
really saying something, was Lucio
Fulci’sZombie. As a kid, I used
to hate looking at the VHS cover with the iconic, rotting, worm eyed,
conquistador zombie (Ottaviano Dell'Acqua).
I wasn’t scared; I was repulsed. Being a growing boy on the verge of puberty, I
didn’t think it wise to be turned off to protein, either. And so, the tape just
sat on my movie shelf, after only being watched once, collecting dust, never to
be touched again for quite some time.

Needless to say, I eventually overcame
this sort of appetite-loss problem and no longer felt sick after watching
zombie films. I don’t know if it is enhanced mental discipline or
desensitization, but I can now eat pizza while watching movies like Zombie and Burial Ground without getting nauseous.

Anyone who may have read my
article for The Beyond during last
year’s gore-a-thon may recall that I wasn’t a fan of Zombie for a while. It took seeing The Beyond for me to re-evaluate what was my negative stand on Zombie.
I was guilty of hoping for another Dawn
of the Dead, ignorantly overlooking every one of the film’s strengths.

Sunday, June 15, 2014

The last film Lucio
Fulci ever worked on, The Wax Mask,
was supposed to have been the grand collaboration between Fulci and Dario Argento,
had it not been for Fulci’s tragic
death some few weeks before filming was to begin. The project came about after Argento had approached Fulci at a 1994 film festival in Rome
and suggested they work together on a new film. This was more of a sympathetic
gesture from Argento who had
intentions of reviving the spirits of an ailing Fulci in a wheelchair, who, at the time, had not worked
on a new film in years. The two were never the best of friends, as Argento always thought Fulci imitated his filmmaking style (the
separate camps weren’t only with the fan base it would seem).

Differences
aside, they mutually agreed upon recreating House of Wax with Fulci
directing. Along with Daniele Stroppa
(The House of Clocks), they wrote
the script for The Wax Mask, an
alternate take on the wax museum myth that doesn’t necessarily feel like a
remake of House of Wax (1953), even
if it is.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

“Do you hear the clarion call? It’s calling out to one
and all.” –Falconer

The horror blogging clarion
call sounds again! That’s right; it’s almost time for Blood Sucking Geek’s second
annual Ultimate Gore-a-thon 2014 -- Another Splatterific Extravaganza! I hope a
fraction of you fantabulously awesome readers remember this event from last year, when nine sites came
together to embark on an ultimate gore-centric blog-a-thon! The event will run
from June 15th to the 21st. Including At the Mansion of Madness, there are, so far, twelve sites. The other blogs/sites taking part in the
upcoming Gore-a-thon are as follows:

Monday, June 9, 2014

My good friend, and fan of this site, Terence, has a cool
Eurocult Tumblr I just found out about yesterday, Chicks with Candles! Not only does it live up to its title, celebrating
the beloved gothic film trope of beautiful maidens with candelabra from
movies like Tragic Ceremony and Baba Yaga, the page also features posters,
cover art, deleted scenes, trivia, interesting but concise observations on
Eurocult films like Jess Franco’sLorna the Exorcist, and, most
importantly, a lot of attractive films I’ve never heard of but really want to
look at. I believe that me and Terence share an affinity for the use of lit candles as a mood enhancing aesthetic on film sets, and it's an elegant idea for a Tumblr page.

Check it out by clicking the delectable image of Rosalba Neri below, and be prepared to stay a while!

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Lightning, angry mobs, grave robbing, and a criminal’s
brain, like so many Frankenstein offshoots / spinoffs / parodies, Lady Frankenstein owes more to James Whale’s classic 1931 horror film
than Mary Shelley’s 1818 literary
masterpiece. Despite its many fitting references to, and retreading to an
extent, some of the plot points to its trendsetting predecessor, Lady Frankenstein is far from feeling
like a gory, colored remake, primarily thanks to the addition of Frankenstein’s
biological daughter, Tania (Rosalba Neri),
a little novelty with a lot of potential, like reimagining the classic 1931
movie with the doctor’s attractive but even more ambitious daughter written
into the story.

In a time when females were grossly underrepresented in science, Tania
Frankenstein shatters what must’ve been a prominent stereotype, enduring her
pursuit as a surgeon, even when faced with sexist instructors at the University;
as she puts it, “the professors have a lot of old fashioned ideas about a woman’s
place.” When she returns home from the University after becoming a licensed
surgeon, her father, Baron Frankenstein (Joseph
Cotten), expresses admiration for her accomplishments, and yet he and his
assistant, Dr. Charles Marshall (Paul Müller),
still treat her as if their work involving cadavers is too much for her
delicate senses to fathom. They seem to not want to involve her in their
gruesome work, but, to their surprise, she’s all for it. They attempt to make
her think they are working with animals, but she has been thinking along the same
lines as her father the entire time, being more interested in human transplants;
“I am my father’s daughter.” Not only does she thoroughly understand her
father’s work, she ends up refining it.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Jess
Franco could film movies faster than I can write reviews for
them. His films can sometimes have an overwhelming low quality feel to them,
making them difficult to digest for the majority. The natural location shots,
haunting tone, memorable and well-chosen female actors (Franco definitely had an eye for female leads that just seemed to
resonate with the camera lens), and Franco’s
brand of bizarre surrealism and eroticism don’t seem to be enough to save the
films for many, but they are nonetheless a huge hit for others. Al otro lado del espejo contains all of
the aforementioned elements and yet has a higher-than-usual quality feel to it,
most likely due to the terrific acting and screen presence from its leading lady (Emma Cohen of Horror Rises from the Tomb and Night
of the Walking Dead) and a believable tragic story.

Jazz pianist/singer Ana (Cohen) is profoundly affected by her
father’s (Howard Vernon) suicide
shortly after her engagement. After calling off the wedding, Ana leaves her
homeland on Madeira Island only to undergo several failed relations when she
intermittently becomes hypnotically driven to kill any man that becomes close
to her.

It isn’t just enough to say that Ana is haunted by images of her dead
father in the mirror. She doesn’t just see him, but she finds herself at times in
the mirror, in Franco’s looking glass
world. It can also be viewed as Ana’s mental reflection on her emotional trauma.
The memory of her father’s suicide driven by his stubborn disapproval of her marrying and
leaving him is intertwined with Ana’s psyche, manifesting itself when she
murders any man that shows any sexual interest in her. Ana’s traumatization,
spurned the moment of her outcry into the mirror, yields a malediction that
could either be viewed as some sort of curse or spell from her father’s ghost
or played off as the result of a kind of posttraumatic stress disorder. If
taken at face value, the goose bumps inducing ending, made more dramatic with
church bells signifying the wedding that never was, reveals which one happens
to be the case.

Monday, April 21, 2014

Down
to the Cellar is a short film from Czech filmmaker Jan
Svankmajer that I’ve grown fond of. I remember feeling a little
underwhelmed when I first watched it, but it stayed with me, for some reason,
and now it’s one of my favorite short films (I wonder if there’s a name for
that kind of art). It was the same with Svankmajer’sAlice (Neco Z Alenky), a creepy vision of Lewis Carroll’sAlice in
Wonderland complete with Svankmajer’s
disturbing but fascinating characteristics. For me, the last quarter of Alice
became a battle to stay awake. I thought Alice
just wasn’t the film for me, but that couldn’t have been more untrue. Alice ended up planting itself in my
mind before slowly taking its hold on me, and, as if a bug had just
bit me, I spontaneously ordered off for the DVD and, on a whim, read for the
first time Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland and Through the Looking
Glass. As those of you that follow my At
the Mansion of Madness fan page on Facebook might have noticed, I have endeavored
to watch as many AIW movies as I can
slowly but surely come across. This is all primarily thanks to Jan Svankmajer’s vision of AIW. Not bad for a movie that I
struggled to stay awake during on first viewing.

Monday, April 7, 2014

Morgiana, by
Slovak director Juraj Herz,is a seldom spoken of curio from the
Czechoslovak New Wave that’s heavily stylized with regards to its visuals and
mood but is straightforward with its story and might feel a little influenced
by the ‘Grand Dame Guignol’ horror of What
Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. Much like Poe’sThe Black Cat, there is an
escalating sense of guilt in its protagonist, aristocratic villainess Viktorie
(Iva Janzurová), that’s not particularly
out of remorse or regret for her crime, but from paranoia, constant annoying
reminders of her misdeed, and fear of being found out, which is where I think a
lot of the suspense comes from.

I like that there is a lot of appeal to its
detestable, unsympathetic villain. Viktorie (Viki) is probably one of my new
favorite villains. She emanates a wicked aura, primarily due to her excessively
evil gothic look that pretty much gives away the nature of her game at first
glance. Janzurová's performance is frightening,
stellar, and versatile. I say versatile because she also plays Viki’s sister, Klára.
The personalities and appearances between the sisters are like night and day,
and I don’t know if I was a bit naïve at the time, but after watching the whole
movie for the first time, I had no idea the same actress played both sisters.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Witchcraft, tainted family history, and murder mysteries are very
agreeable story themes, but writer and director Angelo Pannaccio, hitherto unknown to me, gives these horror
hallmarks an attractively perverse edge with Sex of the Witch.

This is one of those films that brings a
substantially large group of shady relatives together in a family mansion for
the reading of a will, with the inheritance
being split equally among the relatives, with an added stipulation that if any
beneficiary should die before a certain time, their share must be split among
the surviving heirs. Of course this will inevitably create a murderer or two,
amongst the family. I’ve seen a similar plot device in a couple other movies, One Body Too Many and Legacy of Blood, but something
different with Sex of the Witch is
the inclusion of a perverse, evil witch relative with a good measure of hate
and malice for the family, which gives what could’ve been a routine plot device
a rather demented and supernatural spin.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Being a conversation heavy drama mystery with a bit of a dreamy languor
about it, Love and Death in the Garden
of the Gods may require a little focus from viewers if they hope to get
absorbed in its compelling story, beautiful scenery, and tragic characters, but
it is worth it. The plot is more or less structured to be an exploration of a
hazy backstory that slowly crystalizes before eventually catching up with the
present.

The film is directed by Sauro
Scavolini, a prolific screenwriter (All
the Colors of the Dark, amongst many others) with few directing credits. He
is the brother of director Romano
Scavolini (Nightmares in a Damaged
Brain), who also helmed cinematography for Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods.

The story is fed to us in fragmented bits and
pieces from an inquisitive Professor of ornithology (Franz von Treuberg), restoring and listening to a heap of tangled
audio recording tape he discovered in the forest
outside the villa he’s rented to study the non-indigenous birds of the region. As
the Professor listens to the tape recordings, the film cuts to flashbacks of
the previous inhabitants of the villa, making the place seem haunted by a past
that is both alarming and fascinating. While the past is the primary setting of
the story, the film still emphases events in the present, particularly the
relation between the professor and the seedy estate administrator, Dominici (Vittorio Duse), giving the Professor
dimension and making him more than just an avenue of backstory disclosure.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

The astounding gothic chiller Lord of Tears is an official selection for the 32nd Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival(BIFFF), one of the biggest genre film events in Europe. Lord of Tears will be screened against some of the best independent and studio-based films. The event runs from April 8th
to the 20th.

In other news, Lord of Tears' very own Owlman has been making the rounds stalking users
on the chat roulette site Omegle, a
site that randomly pairs people around the world to have a go at a webcam-based
conversation. Watch the amusing responses from terrified users who found
themselves face to face with The Owlman, on the video clip below.

Saturday, January 25, 2014

At first glance, Renato
Polselli’s stylistic S&M fever nightmare, Delirium, might feel like an interesting case study of psychopathy,
but I’m hesitant to call the film’s protagonist a psychopath. He’s definitely a
sadistic maniac of sorts, but a psychopath has no conscience and therefore cannot
feel empathy and remorse. Our maniac, here, feels remorse and is at odds with
himself. After doing harm, he gets emotional and curses his reflection before
shattering the mirror. Just to stop the monster, he tries to set himself up to
be caught by the police.

No sir, he may be a serial killer, but the highly
respected, criminal psychologist and police consultant Dr. Herbert Lyutak (Mickey Hargitay) is no psychopath.

He
actually makes for a compelling lead, thanks to a fair amount of charisma and
outward charm that contrasts with his hidden sick side. It’s made known early
on that Herbert’s a particularly nasty fellow, with a pitch black disturbing
murder sequence involving a young lady (Stefania
Fassio). In making its protagonist a murderer, we have something more
unique from the get go. Though we know Herbert’s a killer, murders still
continue in the traditional ‘whodunit’ giallo style, which imposes the
question of Herbert being the only killer. The multiple murder scenes of pretty
girls getting killed are cruel, which isn’t surprising for a giallo, but Polselli really seems to be trying to
outdo them all.